I encourage you to get into (burnout free) open source - a podcast by Kent C. Dodds

Hey friends so I wanted to talk a little bit about open source. I have been
doing open source for almost as long as I've been doing software
development. And it has been just an enormous benefit to me. I I can't tell
you how how much I've learned and how much of what I know I learned through
open source and so I strongly advise people to get into open source forvarious reasons.In particular, like it makes you a better software developer, you write
higher quality software, you can reuse the software that you create.In aother projects and so yeah it's a lot of fun to get involved but a lot of
people ask me how well there's there's two sides of this how do I get
started and then how do I make sure I avoid burnout as that is the thingthat happens for open source developers.
It's a pretty thankless job in general like that, you don't get financially
compensated most of the time and stuff. So first of all how to getinvolved. I have a blog post that goes into more depth on this. It's called
what open search project should I contribute to or something like that.And the assertion is that you contribute that.Is to something that you use
regularly or that you have experience with. And so when people ask me, hey,do you have anything that I could work on which does happen occasionally. I
always have a hard time answering that because I don't know what you use.
So it'd be better if you find something that you're using and you can work
on improving that in some way. So think about the tools or or the librariesthat you use and find ways to contribute directly to those to make those
things better for yourself and for other users.And then,On the other side of things if you get too into open source and
you kind of lose track of things and and are starting to burn out. Mystrategy for that is I never work on anything that's an open source that I
don't need or don't want to work on just for fun.
And so when somebody opens an issue on my project or something if if it's a
feature enhancement or something that they want, but I don't need it then
sometimes I'll just ignore it. Normally it's nice to to let them know that
they can make a pull request or whatever andEnable them to do that Butother times I just don't have the time and so I just kind of ignore it and
and you know, they can always fork it.So it's never like a dead end for them or anything. So yeah, that's kind of
how I avoid burnouts. If I don't particularly want to do it for the fun of
it, or I don't need to do it for my own stuff then I just don't bother and
I've been doing open source for I don't know like six years or so or seven
years and it's worked out pretty well for me.
So yeah, I encourage you to get into open source. Have a good time with it.Bye.

Further episodes of 3 Minutes with Kent

Further podcasts by Kent C. Dodds

Website of Kent C. Dodds